When you listen to someone talking your brain starts working in sync with the speaker. Greg Stephens (2010) put participants in his research study in an fMRI machine and had them record or listen to recordings of other people talking. What he found is that as someone is listening to someone else talk, the brains patterns of the two people start to couple, or mirror each other. There is a slight delay, which corresponds to the time it takes for the communication to occur. Several different brain areas were synced. He compared this with having people listen to someone talk in a language they did not understand. In that case the brains do not sync up.

Syncing + anticipation = understanding — In Stephen’s study, the more the brains were synced up the more the listener understood the ideas and message from the speaker. And by watching what parts of the brain were lighting up, Stephens could see that the parts of the brain that have to do with prediction and anticipation were active. The more active they were, the more successful was the communication.

Social parts light up too — Stephens noted that the parts of the brain that have to do with social interaction were also synced, including areas are known to be involved in processing social information crucial for successful communication, including the capacity to discern the beliefs, desires, and goals of others.

Wow! Brain syncing – that’s interesting! It reminds me of a study I read at university – that there is something linguists call ‘mutual intelligibility’ that is not entirely dependent on actual spoken language. The evidence quoted was that sometimes speakers of linguistically similar languages say they cannot understand each other (such cases often included barriers such as social or ethnic prejudices), while there are speakers of less similar languages that claim to understand each other quite well.

I teach English in Japan, and one thing I’m really good at is “guessing” what a student is struggling to say. Sometimes I joke about being telepathic, but I guess we’re just brain-syncing.

This is interesting. I’d like to know if people who are detached or depressed are not making that connection with others. And if so would spending more time with them and engaging in an interactive conversation help them gain that ability?